1.2.4 Loading the package

You can detect the successful activation of AUCTeX and
preview-latex in the menus after loading a LaTeX file like
‘preview/circ.tex’: AUCTeX then gives you a ‘Command’ menu,
and preview-latex gives you a ‘Preview’ menu.

For XEmacs, if the installation occured into a valid package directory
(which is the default), then this should work out of the box.

With Emacs (or if you explicitly disabled use of the package system),
the startup files ‘auctex.el’ and ‘preview-latex.el’ may
already be in a directory of the ‘site-start.d/’ variety if your
Emacs installation provides it. In that case they should be
automatically loaded on startup and nothing else needs to be done. If
not, they should at least have been placed somewhere in your
load-path. You can then load them by placing the lines

(load "auctex.el" nil t t)
(load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)

into your init file.

If you explicitly used --with-lispdir, you may need to add the
specified directory into Emacs’ load-path variable by adding
something like